On Friday night, November 8, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked me to come by his residence after sundown for an informal chat. I was in Jerusalem, and he wanted to discuss the talks with the Palestinians and the nuclear negotiations with Iran. As it turned out, I arrived while he was on a secure call with President Barack Obama. When I joined the prime minister after the call, he was as disturbed as I had ever seen him. Earlier in the day, Secretary of State John Kerry had left Israel to go to Geneva to see whether an interim deal on the Iranian nuclear program could be concluded. The Israelis had been surprised that such a deal was suddenly on the brink of happening. Only a week earlier, Israel’s Iran team was briefed on the status of the talks, but National Security Adviser Susan Rice had not authorized the Israelis to be briefed on the actual state of play in the negotiations.

Now the surprise left them alarmed—and Kerry, who had a good relationship with Netanyahu, had not been able to reassure him about the content of the deal. Netanyahu had publicly stated that if the deal was concluded, it would be a “historic mistake.” The president had called to change the prime minister’s view, in no small part because of the impact that Israel’s position would likely have on congressional attitudes toward the emerging deal.

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The call had not worked. I was struck by how alone Netanyahu felt. He believed the United States had given up all its leverage in this deal and the sanctions would now collapse of their own weight, taking all the pressure off the Iranians and freezing the situation. The Iranians would be left as a threshold nuclear state, and Israel would be confronted with unpalatable choices. I challenged his conclusions, saying that the sanctions would not collapse because there was much the United States could do to demonstrate the costs to those businesses that might think of breaking the sanctions regime. He acknowledged that I could be right, but what became apparent is that he interpreted what he heard from the president as a loss of will on his part to keep the pressure up. When I asked him why he drew that conclusion, he said because the president felt politics ruled out the use of force and therefore required a deal.

I told him, “I just don’t believe the president said or meant that. Maybe he was making the point that the war-weariness of our public requires us to demonstrate we made every effort to give diplomacy a chance and this deal gives us the chance to do so.” But the prime minister felt the president was telling him that our domestic reality left him little choice but to do a deal.

I was certain two leaders speaking the same language had talked past each other. I contacted Kerry to let him know that the prime minister had formed an impression about the U.S. position that needed to be corrected. Kerry quickly followed up with a call. But the problem was a White House problem—and not one Kerry could easily correct. Had Tom Donilon still been the national security adviser, he surely would have understood that there was a problem, and he would have immediately spoken to his counterpart. If the impression was not corrected, he would have had Obama make another call.

He had done precisely that in September 2012 when Prime Minister Netanyahu had made public comments, challenging our position on the Iranian nuclear issue. Donilon arranged the call and the air was not only cleared, but there was a meeting of the minds.

By contrast, now there was no call from Susan Rice, there was no follow-up from the president, and the prime minister did not soften his public criticism two weeks later when the actual Joint Plan of Action with Iranian negotiators was concluded. Instead, Rice, reflecting her generally more combative mind-set, would say to Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, that in reacting to the Joint Plan of Action, Netanyahu’s posture was outrageous. In her view, the Israeli leader did everything but “use ‘the N-word’ in describing the president.”

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It didn’t have to play out that way. From the outset of his presidency, Obama was focused on establishing what became known as the dual-track approach to Iran and its nuclear program: Be prepared to deal directly with the Iranians but also build our leverage with them. Engagement put pressure on the Iranians in two ways. First, talking to the United States created deep fissures in the Iranian elite. Second, if the Iranians balked at dealing directly with us, it made it far easier for us to mobilize sanctions against them. The hope was to alter Iran’s behavior through negotiations, but if the Iranians would not engage at all, or engaged but would not budge, we would then be able to garner international pressure on them to change course.

Israel was very much a factor in this approach. To forestall Israeli military action against what Israelis perceived as an existential threat, the president understood we needed to show we could apply meaningful pressure on the Iranians that would alter their nuclear program. In his first meetings with Netanyahu, in May 2009, Obama explained the logic of the dual track—which necessarily had to start with the effort at engagement. When Netanyahu asked how much time we would give engagement—clearly fearing that the Iranians might just string us along as they proceeded with their nuclear development—Obama told him that if nothing happened before the end of the first year, we would pivot toward sanctions. To add to the credibility of our pressure on Iran, the president wanted the Israelis to understand that he meant it when he said that “all options are on the table.”

To that end, we briefed the Israelis on the steps we were taking to act militarily—if it came to that—vis-à-vis the Iranian nuclear program. Obama directed the Pentagon early in the administration to make sure he could back up his promise. He told a small group of us that if he decided at some point that force had to be used, he did not want to be told we did not have the necessary military means. But he also did not want the way we prepared that capability to leave him with no choice but to use force. While engagement and possible sanctions were means to affect the Iranians, they were obviously not ends in themselves. The goal was to get the Islamic Republic to roll back its nuclear program, but the administration did not at this time address what it was ultimately prepared to accept in this regard. Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent a memo to the president emphasizing we needed to be clear on our objective. Gates wanted systematic discussions not just on our goals but also on different scenarios related to the eruption of conflict, including if the Israelis were to strike the Iranian nuclear program and the Iranians retaliated, what should the United States do (support the Israelis, not support them, threaten Iran, etc.). Gates’ memo led to a number of highly sensitive discussions among the principals, including some in which the president participated.

More than anything else, these discussions provided impetus for enhancing our presence in the region and led to further deployments of missile defenses and an additional carrier to the Persian Gulf. We would add to our capabilities to be ready for any contingency—and, in time, we would discuss these with the Israelis.

Although we withheld some military and intelligence capabilities that would have made unilateral Israeli military strikes easier, the president’s inclination was to be very responsive to Israeli military and intelligence requests. Here there was no dissonance among the president’s senior advisers. To the extent there was any disagreement, it had to do with the nature of our objective: Should we prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon or ultimately be prepared to live with it and contain it after the fact? No one minimized the consequences of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons or a nuclear capability. But there was debate over whether we should use force to prevent the Iranians from crossing the threshold if crippling economic sanctions, isolation and diplomatic pressure and negotiations failed to do so. Gates and Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, made it clear that we were in two wars in the region and that was quite enough. They were not soft on Iran, but they were not in favor of the use of force if all other means failed to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons pursuit. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Tom Donilon, deputy secretary of state, Jim Steinberg and I had a different view. But we understood that for coercive diplomacy to succeed—and obviate the need for military strikes—the Iranians had to believe we would use force if diplomacy failed. It was a source of continuing frustration that Gates and Mullen periodically spoke of with the terrible costs of an attack on Iran—whether by us or the Israelis. If the costs were so terrible, why would we ever do it? Why would the Iranians believe the president when he said all options were on the table?